Tag: games

2017 promises to be a great year for gaming, with PC releases from some of the major franchises hitting the shelves this spring. Here at Alberto Statti, we’re just itching to play them all, but here’s a selection of our most anticipated:

Tekken 7Fans of the fighting games will be eagerly awaiting the release of Tekken 7 in early 2017. It’s been a long wait since its predecessor, Tekken 6, was released for the home console market back in 2009. The new instalment, subtitled “Fated Retribution”, features new game mechanics, gameplay changes and eight new characters. Favourites like Yoshimitsu, King and Nina return, and the story revolves around Heihachi, Kazuya and Jin, revealing mysteries like the Devil Gene.

Sniper Elite 4Due for release on 14th February, Sniper Elite 4 promises improved AI, significantly larger maps and the introduction of climbing ability. The third-person stealth shooter is well known for its X-ray kill camera, which shows gruesome details of body parts being torn apart by the player’s bullet. This has now been extended to include other types of kill, such as melee and shrapnel. The story directly follows Sniper Elite 3 and is set in 1943, with protagonist, Karl Fairburne, assisting the Italian resistance.

South Park: The Fractured But WholeDelayed from December 2016 to spring 2017, the second South Park game follows events in “The Stick of Truth”. As their alter ego superhero characters, the children of South Park cannot agree on a franchise plan so embark on a civil war with The Coon (Cartman) leading one side and Mysterion (Kenny) the other. Playing as the New Kid, the player must reunite the gang. Unlike the first game, players can choose to be a boy or a girl, leading to different dialogue.

Outlast 2Horror aficionados will no doubt be keen for the release of Outlast 2 in early 2017, the survival horror sequel that uses a found footage approach to gameplay. This time round, the main character is a journalist investigating a murder in the Arizonan desert. Unfortunately, he encounters a village inhabited by a deranged cult. The plot is said to be based on the real-life Jonestown massacre of 1978.

Mass Effect: AndromedaWith a European release date of 23rd March confirmed, fans can at last get really excited about the fourth Mass Effect instalment. The sci-fi shooter is set in an open world for the first time with several planets to explore. Taking place six centuries after events of the initial trilogy, there is more of a feel of the original game in Andromeda.

Ghost Recon: WildlandsThe Tom Clancy series continues with the release of its fourteenth game and tenth main instalment, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, on 7th March. Taking a new approach that crosses GTA with Far Cry, Wildlands sets Ghost Recon players in an open world for the first time. The map is claimed by Ubisoft to be one of the most expansive they’ve published, and there’s a wide range of terrains. The return to a present-day environment coupled with the vast open world should exceed expectations.

Alberto Statti

No Mans Sky fans have no doubt been part of a major hype in the last couple of months, and there has been a lot of mixed feelings since the release day. No only did some people have buggy loading times, some couldnt even open the game at all. This article was created by Alberto Statti.

Bugs

There were a lot of bugs when the game came out, even after it was delayed for a good few months. This has caused a lot of negative reviews on steam, netting No Mans Sky a measly 1 star within the first 6 hours of release. There was a problem with certain processors that didnt have SSE 4.1 support. This included many older processors for AMD and Intel, this meant the game wouldnt even launch for them.

Next up, if you had the correct support on your processor, there was a good amount of people who got stuck on the initial loading screen where your camera just travels through the stars. This problem affected more people than the processor support problem.

If you managed to get past those two hurdles, there was a problem with the game randomly crashing which affected a bunch of people too.

As you can see, just three major bugs, all three of which were game breaking and required No Mans Sky developers to work through the night for fixes. And work through the night they did!

Patches

Once the bug reports started coming in thick and fast for the No Mans Sky team, they began their bug findindg and fixing mission which had their first patch out within a day or two of release. These updates fixed the above problem and a lot more.

They fixed an issue I personally had where alt-tabbing out of the game would stop the game working where it wouldnt be clickable in the taskbar again.

There was an issue where sometimes the framerate would drop for no reason, this was also fixed with the first patch for me and allowed the game to run smoothly again.

Patch 1.05 was centered around crashes again but more rare ones which not many people experienced such as crashing when doing a scan.

Patch 1.06 was focused on fixing the majority of the problems encountered in the support requests fixing the even less common crashes and save game problems. There was also a number of people getting stuck in the space stations.

Since they had fixed 99.99% of the causes of crashes, they then moved onto balancing and general bugs in patch 1.07. This patch fixed the likes of milestones not being tracked correctly, making it easier to scan certain creatures, reducing amount of times you get warnings in game etc.

Overall, the support they have given since release has been amazing in my opinion, they dont have the biggest team around to bug fix, but there was a lot of patches in a short period which helped the majority of people play. Personally I think I got super lucky as I literally had one crash during my 45 hours of play time and it wasnt even within the first week of playing.

Aesthetics

As I mentioned, I have sunk 45 hours of playtime into No Mans Sky, so I have seen quite a lot of the content the game has to offer. The content isnt completely unique on every planet as you may seen the same type of mushroom monsters and the same structures on different planets but overall I feel like I havent seen the same stuff all the time and everything is different enough to be considered unique. The game worlds themselves are always unique and some that contain life and greenery and water look pretty amazing as you can see below.

No Mans Sky MonolithNo Mans Sky Scenery

Mods

After you have had your fun playing the game and have a good grasp of everything, you can take the game one step further and install a bunch of mods, one of which is called Reshade, it allows you to make the game SO MUCH better looking by removing certain filters, and the slight blurr on everything (maybe the games built in AA).

There are also a bunch of other mods made for the game which enhance the gameplay greatly, they are all worth looking into especially the big things mod

Another great mod is the Project Potato which does exactly as you imagine, it makes the game so low quality that it can run on a potato. This is not only great for those on really bad quality PCs and Laptops but it also adds a new way of playing as it resembles Nintendo 64 graphics to me.

Finally, I personally installed the Deep Space mod which allows you to jump 1000x further with your warp drive. I got it because with my 45 hours of gameplay, I had only travelled 10,000 light years towards the center and it was still 140,000 light years away. I dont mind the usual jump distances but at my current rate it would have taken me another 10 years to get there!

Final Notes

Now that I have finished everything I wanted to do in the game:

Max slot ship(48)

Max slot weapon(24)

Max exosuit slots(48)

Complete all milestones

Reach the Center

Learn a language enough to understand atleast one sentence from an alien

Compete in an epic space battle

Compete in an epic battle on a planet with 5 star sentinels

I believe that the amount of conent in the game is worth the costs I paid. Naturally there will be dissapointed people as there usuallly are, but if you didnt read into every interview, every picture of the game and join the hype train like everyone else and just enjoyed the game for what you got rather than what you didn’t then you would have had an amazing time just like myself. I’m looking forward to see what No Mans Sky has instore for the future as I may come back if they bring out some sort of questing system. Til then, have fun.